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And I can't see anyone not invested in the program as Caring about a movie concerning the Telepath war.
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"And I can't see anyone not invested in [the program, 20 years of the comic book, the series of novels...] as caring about a movie concerning..."
"... a bunch of super-powered mutants"
"... the crew of a starship and the death of one of them"
"... a mafia family"
And how, on a model that predicts the success of a movie based on its source material, does any film based on an original screenplay ever succeed at all?
Look, a movie succeeds or fails based on a couple of things, some of which are beyond the filmmaker's control:
1. Competition - what other films are at there during the crucial initial release weeks when movies live or die.
2. Advertising, venues - how many people know about it, how many screens is it on.
3. Current events - A number of terrorist-themed films were shelved after 9/11. Sometimes a tragedy puts people in the mood for some light escapism and comedies may surge while previously successful dramas stagnate.
The China Syndrome was a middling thriller that got generally poor reviews and was probably destined for the bargain VHS bin when an accident of timing (the nuclear reactor problem at Three Mile Island) suddenly turned it into a box-office blockbuster.
But mostly films succeed or fail based on what they
are and whether or not the public likes them. Probably 2/3rds of the people who eventually saw
Terminator 2 in theaters (including a lot of wives and girlfriends) never saw the original film, which did only a fraction of the box office. The least accessible
Trek films scraped by with the support of hardcore fans, the most accessible ones appealed to a broader audience and sold more tickets.
A pre-existing fanbase or a huge advertising campaign can help a movie
"open". But only good word of mouth can keep a film going. Similarly a film without a huge opening weekend can become a success in the 2nd and 3rd weeks if the people who first saw it like it and recommend it to their friends. It is simply absurd to say that
Firefly's lack of success means that a different film with a different story to tell and a totally different writer and cast won't succeed because both happened to be based on TV series.
People would care about the Telepath War for the same reason people cared about the scientists in
The Andromeda Strain or the family in
The Incredibles - because the stories involve sympathetic characters placed in jeopardy. That's the essence of all drama. Again, just because
we're familiar with all the details of the place of telepaths in the
B5 universe doesn't mean that my sister or my cousin or my aunt Camille would need to know all that to understand a two hour movie about a war. How many people who watched
The Longest Day or
Saving Private Ryan were experts on D-Day, never mind WWII in general? How many watched (and enjoyed)
The Horse Soldiers or
The Beguiled without knowing a damned thing about Civil War?
Again, people are getting caught up in the fact that this is a TV show, which is actually pretty much irrelevant (beyond that opening weekend) to its success as a film. Every film, original or adapted from another medium, is treated pretty much the same by the actual ticket buyers who determine success or failure in the marketplace. Nobody walked into
The Unforgiven with a previous investment in the character of Will Munny, for the simple reason that until the film began nobody knew Will Munny. The learned to care about his character and the outcome of this struggle
by watching the film. Which is the usual way with these things.
Regards,
Joe
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